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Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: > At 9:30 AM -0800 1/17/03, Tim Bray wrote: > > > The notion that you can make money by setting up a tollbooth on a > > piece of Web infrastructure (and thereby driving out all > > open-source/free offerings as a side-effect) is a radical proposal > > without even an existence proof. > > > Would either Flash or RealAudio qualify as an existence proof? If not, > why not? In my opinion, Flash serves as a demonstration of the limitations of proprietary formats. Less then 10% of the data on the Web the _should be_ vector graphics _are_ vector graphics and the same goes for animations. The concept of "animated GIF" is pretty bizarre and yet amazingly popular: because to date the alternative has been Flash with all of its proprietary binary badness. I'm expecting SVG to change that situation. RealAudio is also not a good example because the audio-on-the-Web world is badly fragmented between various encoding forms. That would probably not happen if the W3C had blessed an RF real-time audio format. Paul Prescod
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